Chris Hartmire
American minister and social justice activist (1932-2022)
Wayne Clyde "Chris" Hartmire Jr. (June 5, 1932 – December 18, 2022) was an American Presbyterian minister, civil rights activist, and labor organizer. As director of the California Migrant Ministry, he organized Protestant church support for César Chávez and the United Farm Workers. He later became the founding director of the National Farm Worker Ministry.
Early life and education
Chris Hartmire was born in Philadelphia in 1932 and raised in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, in a middle-class Presbyterian family. He attended Upper Darby High School and in 1954 earned a degree in civil engineering from Princeton University. He was a naval officer in the mid-1950s, and later he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he was influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology of social justice.
Ministry and early activism
After receiving his Master of Divinity, Hartmire was ordained in 1960 and began working with East Harlem Protestant Parish, running youth programs primarily for African American and Puerto Rican teens. In 1961, he joined a Freedom Ride to challenge segregation in the South. He was arrested in Tallahassee, Florida for unlawful assembly while peacefully asserting the right to be served in a segregated airport restaurant.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chris Hartmire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.